Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.

If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit Americancatholichistory.org

slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crow. And I'm Tom Crow.

Today we're talking about the racial integration of Catholic churches, schools, and other

institutions in North Carolina.

This process, which began more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964,

was the life's work of most reverend Vincent Waters, who

was Bishop of Raleigh from 1945 until his death in 1974. Bishop Waters was born and raised

in Roanoke, Virginia, which is way out west in the state. He went to college at Belmont Abbey College,

a good Catholic school near Charlotte, North Carolina,

and went to St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, followed by the North American College in Rome.

He was ordained a priest in Rome in 1931 and returned to the U.S. as a priest for the Diocese of

Richmond in 1932. His life prior to his time in Rome, obviously, had him living in the midst

of the Jim Crow South, though he didn't really come to a realization about his own blindness on

race issues during this time. But his time in Rome helped him see things differently than what

it experienced in Virginia and North Carolina. We've talked about this in a couple of previous episodes,

episode 84 with Maria Edmonia Lewis,

and again episode 122 about Father Augustus Tolton.

In Rome, the racial segregation and discrimination

that was such a thing in much of America simply didn't exist.

Since Rome was a universal city and home of the entire global Catholic Church,

Catholics from every part of the globe went there on equal footing and studied, prayed, worshipped, and recreated side by side,

...